William James’s Ethical Republic (original) (raw)

"William James's Ethical Republic," Journal of the History of Ideas 72.2 (2011): 255-277

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. Careful analysis of his ethical writings in the context of his psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical ideas, however, tells a different story. This article reveals the consistency and coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

William James on Moral Philosophy and its Regulative Ideals

2019

James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more naturalistically respectable material such as our evaluative practices, but in doing so, he also faces up to the possibility that this objectivity is something we may fail to achieve. This comparatively pessimistic prospect in turn explains his surprising pivot toward the divine at the end of the "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (MPML) James's appeal to the divine is characteristically idiosyncratic, however, and this paper will attempt to explain how it fits in with the more generally naturalistic framework that dominates the rest of the paper.

WILLIAM JAMES (D. 1910) VIEWS ON ETHICS

IRSYAD 2018 E-Proceeding, 2018

William James is an American-born philosopher. Although he is also known as a psychologist, his writings emerged as America's early contribution to modern philosophy. He is one of the great proponents of pragmatism and had promoting the idea around Europe and America. The main objective of this paper is to study the important aspects of James writings on ethics. This qualitative research will analyze his ethical views based on his writings The Will to Believe, Pragmatism A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and Pragmatism and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth as well as other researchers' findings. This article found that ethics according to James are consequentialism, pluralism and meliorism. All the three principles used are subjected to criticism as it was mainly based on ratio-empirical method which caused moral relativism. Whereas, this article upholding Islamic ethical system for its strong foundation and stable thus will provide objective and universal values for man.

Who Are Moral Philosophers?: Ethics William James Style

The paper argues that although James does a good job in showing how his conception of the moral philosopher’s concrete standpoint offers a sharp rebuke of traditional moral philosophy’s preoccupation with demonstrating other-regarding obligations to an egoist skeptic, his meta-ethical argument for inclusivity seems vulnerable to the sort of skeptical doubts raised by Aiken/Talisse’s (2011) intolerant fundamentalist. I argue that an explication of the concrete experiential starting point of James’ moral philosophy puts to rest these doubts. This standpoint includes James’ relational account of the self, which stresses identity formation via the capacity to sympathetically apprehend the point of view of others, and James’ phenomenological exploration, in the essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” to the experience of overcoming blindness to others’ alien ideals.

William James and the Moral Life

2022

This book offers a compelling new interpretation of James' moral philosophy: an "ethics of responsible self-fashioning." James' performative writing style articulates this conception by showing how moral inquiry serves both social and personal transformation. James the social moral philosopher seeks to create an inclusive moral order through expansion of sympathetic concern among those committed to different ideals. James the existential moral philosopher defends the right to adopt hope-grounding metaphysical beliefs which encourage strenuous moral action in the face of evil and suffering. The power of James' ethics is demonstrated by its application to current discussions about the status of marginalized nonhuman animals and that of the cognitively disabled. William James and the Moral Life is of interest to a wide variety of ethicists and has special appeal to scholars and advanced students in moral philosophy, social philosophy, pragmatism, and American philosophy.

William James: On the border between sciences and religion

Romanian Medical Journal, 2019

The American physician, William James (1842-1910), a published philosopher and psychologist, will perhaps be forever remembered as the first psychologist in United States. But his influence on universal culture was much deeper. Together with the mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) he laid the foundation for pragmatism. James considers the human mind as a dynamic concept. James also contributed to functional psychology by attempting to define the subconscious in relation to the perception of personal existence. His medical studies led him to perceive psychology as a branch of biology. In the book he published only a year before he passed away, The Meaning of Truth (1909), James postulated radical empiricism. According to the American psychologist, human consciousness is a complex process, not just a data flow, but also the creation of networks and connections between these fragments, and human experience is a cumulative, non-random connection process. Numerous philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, logicians, mathematicians, and even literary writers are indebted to William James for his innovative ideas. The multidisciplinary of this visionary man's theories is unquestionable. He managed to create a system of thinking which blended all the aspects encountered when studying human mind.